This invention relates to a method of supplying drug the ampules to any of ampule feeders of an ampule dispenser that holds insufficient or no ampules in stock.
In hospitals, more than 600 kinds of ampules that hold different medications for injection are prescribed. This figure will increase still further as new drugs are developed. Some of them are used very frequently, while others are very rarely prescribed. It would be immensely troublesome and inefficient to manually collect all of the prescribed ampules.
Thus, it is an ordinary practice to select approximately 200 of the 600 kinds of ampules that are used most frequently and store them in an ampule dispenser so that only these 200 kinds of the most frequently used ampules can be collected automatically by the ampule dispenser. Such an ampule dispensing system is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application 7-69566.
This system has a plurality of ampule feeders that keep different kinds of ampules. Ampules ordered in prescriptions are discharged from the corresponding feeder into a tray. The tray is then sent to an inspection station. It is not necessary to transfer the ampules from one tray to another.
Since the ampule dispenser keeps only frequently used ampules, each ampule feeder will soon run short or out of ampules in stock. When a certain feeder has insufficient or no ampules in stock, a pharmacist checks a tag on the feeder that indicates the name of the ampuled drug stored in the depleted feeder, collects ampules of the same kind stored in the depleted feeder from an ampule storage box in a drug storage, and supplies them to the feeder.
Ampuled medications for injection are highly active drugs, and an incorrect medication could kill a patient. Thus, they have to be handled with extreme care, especially considering the fact that some ampules are very similar in shape and size or completely the same in shape and size with only their contents being different, even though they contain completely different types of drugs. Moreover, some of these ampules contain very powerful drugs.
One problem with the above-described automatic ampule dispenser is that even if ampules to be stored in one feeder are put in a feeder next to the intended feeder, this fact can be detected only in the final inspection stage.
Although such automatic ampule dispensers are becoming indispensable in handling large quantities of ampules smoothly and efficiently, they have no means for positively preventing ampules from being supplied into wrong ampule feeders.
That is, whether or not the correct ampules are supplied into the correct feeders is checked only visually by pharmacists. There is no double-check means which can prevent human errors.
An object of this invention is to provide a method of supplying the correct ampules to the ampule feeders of an automatic ampule dispenser with the highest reliability.